Tuesday, 9 March 2010

As I mentioned in my last post, there has been work to create a dock-agnostic DBus API for manipulating items displayed on a dock. We now have an API draft which is implemented by latest Awn and a word from Docky's lead developer to implement the API once they have some time to do so.

As I was testing our implementation of the API, I took some of Docky's python helper scripts and converted them to use the new methods - results can be found @ https://code.launchpad.net/~mhr3/+junk/dock_scripts. So far I played with pidgin, rhythmbox, but mostly with transmission helper which now seems to me really useful. Have a look yourself:

What's next? The best thing would be to create a separate project for the dock helper scripts with some kind of configuration UI and rewrite the base python API, so it can work better (usable as both standalone scripts, but also provide a helper class for easy integration as plugins for other applications - obviously rhythmbox's helper script should be a plugin for rhythmbox to keep the memory usage down for one). And now I wonder if there are any volunteers for this... :)